As go cars and young couples in their backseats, so goes America.
Much has been written about the American teenager’s cooling passions for the similarly tactile diversions of driving and sexual intercourse. Parents, and their willingness to facilitate the lives of their teens while overprotecting their children’s bodies at the cost of their minds, are at least partially to blame. Kids have never been more risk-averse, indicating a shift toward timidity; we should deny it a foothold on our shores.
Rob Henderson explains the scale of the loss for the Free Press:
When I was in high school in 2006, I had a group of six guy friends. All of us grew up poor, and none of us had much interest in college. Yet every single one of us cared deeply about one thing: getting a car as soon as possible.
. . .
That was less than two decades ago, when more than 80 percent of American 18-year-olds were licensed to drive. Now, that number has plummeted to just 60 percent. This means that about 1.5 million newly minted adults have no idea what it feels like to get behind the wheel.
Liberty (sex) and driving are intrinsically linked — backseat shenanigans are arguably how modern America was conceived. (It may be an amoral aside, but if we’re concerned with dropping birth rates, babies need to happen sooner than later. Statistically, teens who drive have sex at a remarkably higher rate than their pedestrian peers.)
As Jonah Goldberg puts it:
In the 1920s, conservatives complained about foreign ideas corrupting the youth, as if licentiousness was some virus that escaped a lab in Paris and was brought home by returning soldiers. Left out of the conversation, for the most part, was the fact that one the great drivers of the rise in out-of-wedlock births (and shotgun weddings) in the 1920s was the widespread introduction of the automobile. Suddenly, teenagers had a much easier time escaping the prying eyes of parents and neighbors.
With the adoption of the automobile, high-school sweethearts became newlyweds as often from the aftermath of Buick-hosted baby-making as they did from religious observance. But notice that the couples got married, at least until the Sexual Revolution — thanks, hippies. Also, the automobile was a necessary component to creating private space suitable for necking.
Now, kids with reduced oversight can find sexual satisfaction in the privacy of a room in a house without parents. There’s no work or development involved in accessing PornHub — all it takes is a cellphone and a locked door. For a young man in 1950, sex happened after he underwent a campaign of responsibility: acquiring a car, wooing a young woman, and then working up the nerve to make a move. To make out, one had to make it. For girls, intimacy was a years-long project of guile and transforming into women to subtly convince young men to pursue and woo them. Masturbation has always existed, but it was taboo and hardly the equal of today’s virtual-reality-assisted self-destruction. Young women report higher levels of sexual violence from men, a likely result of brutal, debased fantasies derived from porn.
Driving and sex were a process, an aspiration borne of observing seniors slobbering on each other in the parking lot as freshmen — learned behavior that our pubescent population hasn’t observed, instead sequestered in homes with unmetered access to mankind’s filth on a bottomless upward scroll.
More than that, learning to drive was a dream that originates in perceived need.
With the exception of my birth, at no point in my childhood did anyone else in the household think I was the preeminent figure in the Abel family’s transportation schedule. Mom worked long hours in the jail as an instructor, and my dad walked to and from the Sheboygan Sheriff’s Department. Pick-up from school, practices, and events revolved around what mom and dad had going on — 15 minutes of squatting on a curb was routine.
It’s when sitting next to a grate and tossing pebbles into its maw that a kid gets to reflect — reflect that he should very much like to drive as soon as he is legally able. He’ll even consider whether becoming a farmer would be worth the ability to legally drive at 14 instead of 16.
Loved as we were, my siblings and I did not dictate when and where we would be unless our bikes could get us there, and only after asking permission. Carpooling with friends, walking, and the bus were all alternatives. Mom and Dad made it clear to us that transporting us was a gift, and that they would like for us to drive as soon as we were able. Expectations were made clear early, and mom and dad were willing to pay for driving instruction. Everyone won.
Broken homes, physical overprotection, and a break in the American teenager’s development have all conspired to make kids poorer, emotionally and sexually confused, and helplessly reliant on the worst influences.
Additionally, what memories will these teens enjoy? There’s no longterm happiness found in shuttered blinds and self-abuse. Part of the fun of driving around one’s hometown as an adult is reminiscing about the places we drag-raced our hoopties, stole kisses on the lakeshore, and otherwise experienced the terrors and thrills of adolescence. What kid will have a filial attachment to a hometown he’s never explored for himself? For those interested in fostering local institutions, we need the city’s young to love her.
Parents owe their teens the ability to be free enough to fail before they’re out of the house — owe them the ability to taste freedom while still answering to a higher authority that isn’t a lawman. And kids need to know what it is to lack — to want what they cannot have today but can work toward having tomorrow.
Ultimately, the issue is one of our diminishing ability to accommodate risk. Told by the world to stay home lest they endanger their elders, teens today have responded to the fear by turning inward. America is in the risk business; it always has been. A world of risk-takers have made this place home over the generations — we’re the people who launch rockets and laugh when they explode and invented deep-fried butter. There’s no other place that could produce a WhistlinDiesel or accommodate Elon Musk’s vision. Backwaters such as Europe can keep their safetyism and anachronistic transit technologies that stink of socialism.
As go cars and young couples in their backseats, so goes America. C’mon, kids: Buy a car, fall in love, get married, have babies, and buy those babies a car.